Since the disappearance of SGI's "Download Cool Software" site was roughly contemporary with the insertion of the serial number validation routine into the hardware L1 and L2 controller updates, there's at least a small chance the emulator software doesn't include enforced serial validation <though that may be of limited usefulness if the connected L1s have been flashed with one of the enforced validation images>.

If it'd work it'd be helpful for those considering assembling a composite system with a R-Brick obtained from eBay <or anywhere else where it might come with a non-matching/enforced serial number>.

It's supposed to fit right into 2.4.x kernels (contruary to what the docs says about RedHat 6.2, which is kernel 2.2.x!), so hopefully more modern releases should work. I'm giving RedHat 9 a chance on a Thinkpad T21 which might come in handy for these sorts of activities, plus Minicom is quite useful as a terminal emulator for RS232-activities. Hopefully I'll do a quick summary once I get things to work...

The L2 emulation seems to work well - here's the out put of "env" for an O350 - run from a linux box:

as mentioned, there's even a pseudo L2 Display:

L3.png (7.5 KiB) Viewed 1347 times

This install was into Ubuntu 9.10 running a 2.6.31-14 kernel. It was a roll yer own / rpm conversion adventure for me, but if you have the skills necessary to avoid backtracing cryptic error messages it probably won't be too hard .

On the linux end, if you issue a Control+D the L2 emulator takes you to an IRIX command line; it works in the opposite direction as well - l2cmd works to control the L2 emulator from the IRIX end.

It seems to be a very handy app - especially if you don't happen have an L2 <and even if you do, you can use the linux box as an L3 and connect to the L2 via ethernet and admin remotely - using "l2term" on the linux end>.

I've installed the L3 software on an older release of Fedora in a VM, and had the l2 and l2gui programs speaking to my O300 bricks via USB. This first cut is much too bloated (~6GB on disk), but in December I'll work on sorting out something slimmer to make available as an appliance image - same idea as DINA, and in fact I was running it on the same underlying machine. I'll start a separate thread when I get back to it.

I've installed the L3 software on an older release of Fedora in a VM, and had the l2 and l2gui programs speaking to my O300 bricks via USB. This first cut is much too bloated (~6GB on disk), but in December I'll work on sorting out something slimmer to make available as an appliance image - same idea as DINA, and in fact I was running it on the same underlying machine. I'll start a separate thread when I get back to it.

Not a bad idea, might make sense to have both. If you just need to boot up and manipulate serial numbers to get some bricks sorted, the LiveCD might be very handy. But if you're using the performance monitoring/tuning tools, collecting stats over time might make a VM preferable.

We'll see. I've never tried to put a LiveCD together, so that might be a useful and interesting exercise too. I've got another week plus on the road, however.